Debate on European unity is often vague as to the boundaries of
'Europe'. The word 'Europe' is widely used as a synonym for the European Union, although much of the
European continent is still not in the EU.

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'Multi-speed
integration'

A thesis, sometimes referred to as a 'Multi-speed
Europe', envisions an alternative type of European integration,
where the EU countries who want a more integrated EU, can
accelerate their own integration, while other countries may go at a
slower pace or cease further integration altogether. Specific
current examples include the euro
and the Schengen Agreement which not all
members have elected to join.

Present
situation

The European
Union (EU) is not de
jure a federation but various academic observers conclude
that it is one.

Here is the view of Professor R. Daniel Kelemen (Rutgers
University) on how various brands of scholars approach the
issue:

Unencumbered by the prejudice that the EU is sui generis and
uncomparable, federalism scholars now regularly treat the EU as a
case in their comparative studies (Friedman-Goldstein, 2001;
Fillippov, Ordeshook, Shevtsova, 2004; Roden, 2005; Bednar, 2006).
For the purposes of the present analysis, the EU has the necessary
minimal attributes of a federal system and crucially the EU is
riven with many of the same tensions that afflict federal
systems.[1]

According to Joseph H. H. Weiler, "Europe has
charted its own brand of constitutional federalism".[7]
Jean-Michel Josselin and Alain Marciano see the European Court of Justice as
being a primary force behind building a federal legal order in the
Union[8] with
Josselin stating that "A complete shift from a confederation to a
federation would have required to straightforwardly replace the
principalship of the member states vis-à-vis the Union by that of
the European citizens. ... As a consequence, both confederate and
federate features coexist in the judicial landscape."[9]

According to Thomas Risse and Tanja A. Börzel , "The EU only
lacks two significant features of a federation. First, the Member
States remain the `masters' of the treaties, i.e., they have the
exclusive power to amend or change the constitutive treaties of the
EU. Second, the EU lacks a real `tax and spend' capacity, in other
words, there is no fiscal federalism."[10]

This view is not simply confined to academics, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing found
opposition from the United Kingdom towards including the word
"federal" in the European
Constitution, and hence replaced the word with "Community".[11][12][13] It
can be argued, however, that simply because one man calls something
a federation does not mean it is actually so. The European Union
does not have some key characteristics of a federation, some of
which have been mentioned above. The European budget is very small
and does not finance a lot of the economic activity of the European
Union. Each member state of the European Union has its own foreign
relations and has its own military if it so desires. It is often
the case that European Union member states decide to opt out of
agreements which they oppose. In certain areas the European Union
has some control of its member states. In a lot of other cases,
however, the member states have sovereignty which would never be
given to members of a federation. One important fact is that
treaties must be agreed by all member states even if a particular
treaty has support among the vast majority of the population of the
European Union. Member states may also want legally binding
guarantees that a particular treaty will not affect a nation's
position on certain issues.

^J.H.H. Weiler (2003). "Chapter 2,
Federalism without Constitutionalism: Europe's Sonderweg".
The federal vision: legitimacy and levels of governance in the
United States and the European Union. Oxford University Press.
ISBN 0199245002.
"Europe has charted its own brand of constitutional federalism. It
works. Why fix it?"

^
V. G. d'Estaing (7 July 2003), The Wall Street Journal
Europe: I knew the word 'federal' was ill-perceived by the
British and a few others. I thought that it wasn't worth creating a
negative commotion, which could prevent them supporting something
that otherwise they would have supported. ... So I rewrote my text,
replacing intentionally the word 'federal' with the word
'communautaire, which means exactly the same thing.